Obama To Nearly Double the Available Broadband Wireless Spectrum

suraj.sun tips news that the Obama administration announced today plans to free up roughly 500MHz of the wireless spectrum for commercial broadband. From the Washington Post: "The commitment backs a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission to auction off broadcasters' and government spectrum to commercial carriers that envision their networks running home appliances, automobile applications, tablet computers and other wireless devices. White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said in a speech outlining the president's plan that freeing up more spectrum will spur economic growth through auctions of the airwaves and investment in wireless networks and technology. ... The FCC has proposed that 280 megahertz of spectrum come from broadcasters and other sources, 120 of which would come from broadcasters. The other 220 megahertz would come from the federal government's holdings managed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration."

Re:amateur license vs unlicensed power output

[Gazoogleheimer]

Yes, and you are correct. We could technically use wifi amplifiers to boost our 2.4GHz signal to a (frightening, costly, and horribly impractical) 1500 watts. However, no encryption is allowed in that case, even HTTPS.

Re:Charge YOU?

[BuckaBooBob]

Thats a big part of the problem... They are going to Auction it off.. The 700mzh spectrum they auctioned off 2 years ago is still not yet deployed... for the most part Carriers are Buying up spectrum to prevent competition.. What is needed in the US market is more lightly Licensed Spectrum like the 3.65-3.7 that the smaller companies can afford to use so that there is some competition... right now all the unlicensed band is consumed where there is any population density and the 3.65-3.7 is just too small to make much of a difference.. not to mention the license for it is broken.. As it only takes 1 person in a area to make the whole spectrum unusable and there is no recourse for anyone to take to get them to properly use the spectrum.

Re:amateur license vs unlicensed power output

[nmos]

I think you're mixing up a bunch of different things. It's true that amateur radio licenses can operate on different frequencies than the rest of us and can transmit at high power levels on those frequencies. Their call sign is assigned when they get their licence and they are required to broadcast it at regular intervals while transmitting (among other rules). This call sign has nothing whatsoever to do with WiFi ssids.

Re:Wow... what a worthless article

[evilviper]

??? A 500mHz band has the same data capacity regardless of whether it starts at 0Hz or 60gHz.

At ~2.5Ghz you hit the resonant frequency of water mollecules, and any signals you send through the lower atmosphere are guaranteed to be attenuated in a rather short distance. At 60GHz, you actually hit the resonant frequency of OXYGEN, which means the signal is going nowhere fast.

Re:Wow... what a worthless article

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not an entirely true statement.

Technically, yeah, 0-500GHZ and 60-60.5GHZ can carry the same amount of data.

And yes, 0-500mhz is more valuable than 60,000mhz-60,500mhz, because of its ability to ignore matter.

You however, neglect the fact that these two points are NOT mutually exclusive.

Since the lower range has a better chance of reaching its target, you can pack more data in with less of a worry of losing data.
Since you have to worry less that data will be lost, then you don't require as much overhead for handshaking in the transmission protocols, further freeing up more space.

things are not as simple as they may appear

Re:Over the Air TV

[Trip Ericson]

Yes, and it clearly states on one of their pages you must be on a "multicast-capable ISP." How many ISPs are "multicast capable" do you suppose?

Re:Drak. There goes my TV

[commodore64_love]

Anonymous Coward wrote:
Well, when the government GAVE away, for free, those frequencies to networks

Say what? -1 Wrong. Every local station PAYS for their frequency. The FCC collects over a billion dollars each year from TV broadcasters, plus requiring broadcasters to SERVE the public by providing news, weather, emergency and government announcements for Free (rather than charge $50 a month like cellphone providers).

Re:Over the Air TV

[Lunix Nutcase]

They have more than a dozen ISPs participating.

Re:Over the Air TV

[ChatHuant]

So it's more efficient to put up giant transmitters and blast out a signal that can be accessed clearly from the fricking moon, across a mindbogglingly wide swath of the spectrum, than it is to only send the data to the people who are requesting it?

Of course it's more efficient, for most reasonable definitions of efficient. That's why broadcast stations were developed first, long before cable systems. You don't need giant transmitters, nor do you need to broadcast to the moon (though you CAN, if you want - try doing it with cable!). Broadcast is vastly more efficient for certain ranges of applications: the infrastructure cost is fixed (the price of the broadcast stations) and doesn't change with the number of subscribers, the system scales perfectly (if your users count changes from 1000 to 1000000 overnight it JUST WORKS - you don't need to get new servers/routers/contracts with your bandwidth provider). It has theoretically infinite upper user limit. It can serve rural users even if they have no connection with the rest of the world, and it allows mobility easily.

The important thing is to understand the strengths and limitations of broadcast and point-to point systems and use each where it makes sense: broadcast is best when the same data needs to be sent to a relatively large number of users, at the same time. When you want customized data sent to many small sets of users, at different times, point to point connections are better.

To clarify, here's an example: traffic data for a city is tailor made for broadcast: it's of interest to many users, it needs to be consumed as soon as it's available (when you drive you want the most recent traffic data, not yesterday's traffic), and there is little space for customization (and whatever of it there is, it can be done client-side). On the other hand, e-mail is really bad for broadcast, since you'd use the whole tower bandwidth to send data to a single user.

Re:Oh that's nice

[thatskinnyguy]

A slice of that spectrum was already given to Fire Departments. Effective 7/1

Re:Charge YOU?

[TheRaven64]

$19.6 Billion is just too much money to just ignore and let go missing

No it isn't. The US Federal budget for last year was $3,518 Billion. The money from the sale accounted for just over 0.5% of it. The money didn't go missing, it just showed up as a line item in the federal income column, along with tax revenue. The total Federal income for 2009 was $2,105 Billion, so this accounted for just under 1% of the government's total income, which is too small to show up in anything but the most detailed breakdowns.

Always check primary sources.

[dtmos]

There are three new papers on this subject on the Whitehouse.gov [whitehouse.gov] site today -- one is a fact sheet [whitehouse.gov], one is the Presidential memorandum on the subject [whitehouse.gov], and one is Larry Summers' prepared remarks to the New America Foundation [whitehouse.gov].

If one reads them one discovers that, as Larry Summers' remarks put it,

The President’s plan has four parts:

First, identify and plan for the release of 500 MHz of spectrum.

In order to achieve this, we need a two-pronged strategy that focuses on the opportunities to use both Federal and commercial spectrum more efficiently and to free up spectrum for new uses such as wireless broadband.
First, the government will examine how we are currently using spectrum and identify areas for improvement, consolidation, or sharing. To that end, we are pursuing a separate fast-track process to identify a down payment of specific bands of spectrum that could be freed up.
Second, we will encourage commercial spectrum holders to avail themselves of opportunities to transition their uses if there are more efficient possible uses of their spectrum.
While we go forward with this planning process, the Department of Commerce and the FCC are also conducting an inventory of spectrum use that will help inform potential end-users of the spectrum and improve transactions in secondary markets.

The second part of the President’s plan is to provide new tools and new incentives to free up spectrum.

[...]

Third, redeploy the spectrum to high-value uses.

[...]

Fourth and finally, use the auction proceeds to promote public safety and job-creating infrastructure investment.

It's clear from this that the frequencies have not yet been found -- this initiative is essentially a command to the FCC to go out and find 500 MHz. Somehow. Somewhere.